Friday, August 24, 2012

All about the Benjamins...

...the Alien ones, that is.

Hopefully by now you've seen some of the incredible short films directed by Seth Worley. If not, you really should.Recently, Seth asked me to help contribute to his latest opus: Order Up. If you want to avoid spoilers, go see it now,... then come back and I'll give you a little step by step of my meager contribution.Spoilersto follow..;Needing a graphic UI for the Alien spacecraft that "detains" our put-upon pizza delivery guy... Seth sent me the rough footage of the guy inside the ship, reacting to the alien scans of his body and the pizzas. After that, we would need to see some UI interaction with the pizza as it's removed/levitated away from the guy. We knew that we wanted it to appear alien and organic, but we'd also need to understand what was happening (IE: don't make it too unfamiliar).That being said I mocked up a few ideas, using a still from the footage:

My thinking was that as the UI unfolds/comes to life, that tiny "tendrils" could extend from the main interface and "touch" the various points of interest (his body, head, pizzas) and deploy tiny info "blocks" at each interaction.

I wanted to create some symbology that would represent numbers, letters, etc.. that would pop up and roll over as needed. (Seth would be doing the animation in AE and I would be feeding him the elements- in this case vector based). I also thought it might be fun to briefly show a mri type image of his brain as the aliens are quickly running through their various diagnostic scans (don't blink or you'll miss it.)

At the same time, I was pursuing the other designed element--the "alien money" (which appears at the end of the film). The direction was to create a bill for our actor to hold that would represent the legal tender of our pizza loving visitors. With tongue in cheek direction ("MIB-ish, 6 eyes"), I went about sketching up possible "presidents/emperors" who would occupy the place of honor on the piece. Here's a few of my favorite runner-ups and the two finalists;

In conjunction, we were using the South African Rand as our base inspiration- and I went about suggesting layout variations with our prez.

Next up, I did a much tighter rendering of El Presidente' adding lots of shadows & contrast (before hitting him with a standard halftone filter to deliver an "etching" effect to further communicate "It's MONEY"):

Finally it was time to take the portrait, along with some of the elements/symbols that I'd already developed for the interface and integrate them into our bill. I did several color variations based on our SA rand reference:

In the end, it was felt that the coloration of U.S. bills would probably be the quicker read.Here's the final: